FORWARD TO DEFEAT

During the Bush administration there were only two American commanders of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Under Obama there have so far been five. There has been a new ISAF commander nearly every single year that Obama has been in office. The only exception is 2012 when Obama was too busy trying to win an election to bother further sabotaging a losing war.

General McKiernan’s firing was put down to the need for fresh ideas. McKiernan was deemed too “old school” because he wanted to fight an old-fashioned war against the Taliban while Obama Inc. believed that the war couldn’t be won by beating the Taliban, but by winning the hearts and minds of Afghans. It was a fashionable and doomed strategy that required sacrificing the lives and limbs of thousands of American soldiers to political correctness.

The old-school general who had once said, “I don’t understand ever putting your men and women in harm’s way, without their having the full ability to protect themselves. That also means operating on actionable intelligence to defeat insurgents, and protect your forces. That’s how you keep your soldiers alive,” was clearly not the man for that job.

FULL SPEED AHEAD TO STUPIDITY

There were idiots dressed as polar bears and one idiot dressed up as a whooping crane. Occupiers showed up in black hoodies with their faces covered, not so much as a disguise, but for warmth. The Forward on the Climate or For the Climate or Away from the Climate rally was a real cross-section of American idiots. There were electric bicycle salesmen, yoga instructors, Quakers and environmental science students.

Lots of white people raised their fists in the air in solidarity with something. Possibly the climate. Robert Redford wrote an editorial in support of the protest, but didn’t bother flying a private jet over to take part. There was an awkward dance party. There were a few obligatory giant puppets. Everyone was cold, but everyone pretended that the planet was burning up.

Kids roped in by their idiot parents shivered while holding up signs about solar power. College students swarmed around the buses that brought them and texted while old hippies made speeches. There was a giant model of a pipeline or maybe a windmill. No one could tell. And there were lots of signs about how everyone loved Mother Earth.

TIME FOR SOME MORE EVOLUTION

Jon Huntsman writing an article about why conservatives should embrace gay embrace at the American Conservative, a magazine co-founded by Pat Buchanan, is already a strange marriage.

Huntsman is pushing the thoroughly unoriginal and discredited idea that the Republican Party has to stay competitive by becoming socially liberal and fiscally free market. That was the Romney campaign in a nutshell and it was not terribly appealing. The last election should have been a reminder that a socially liberal country of broken families is not going to vote for small government or the free market. Not when it depends on government aid.

Huntsman says that every marriage should be treated equally under the law. Which it is. Gay marriage innovates a new entity using a name that does not apply to it. It’s the usual leftist tactic of broadening a definition until it no longer means anything. But if Huntsman really means that every marriage should be treated equally, why not recognize polygamy? There is no answer, because there is no logical argument. And 10 years from now, he will be arguing that to win Muslim votes, the Republican Party should recognize Polygamy.

A RAPE-FREE ZONE

Amanda Collins is a young rape survivor. While in college in 2007, she was raped 50 feet away from the campus police department office at the University of Nevada-Reno and was lucky to get out alive. Her attacker was James Biela, a serial rapist who raped two other women and murdered another. He attacked her at gun point in a gun free zone. At the time of the attack, Collins was in possession of a concealed weapons permit but was not in possession of her firearm due to university policies prohibiting carrying concealed weapons on campus.

NO IRISH NEED APPLY AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

Breezy Point, Queens is a heavily Irish neighborhood in New York City. It took a lot of damage in the storm and it brought volunteers from Ireland over to help it rebuild.

But unlike the Haitian, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Chinese neighborhoods in New York City… there is something very wrong about having an Irish neighborhood.

Or at least that is what Sarah Maslin Nir and the New York Times have concluded.

"But complicating the current embrace from abroad is the gated community’s extreme insularity. Breezy Point is the whitest neighborhood in the city, a demographic makeup that critics say illustrates the enclave’s entrenched xenophobia, a dark flip side, perhaps, to all that ethnic pride."

There is no such “dark side” or “xenophobia” to other neighborhoods in the city. It’s okay for every other group to live together and have a common history. A Dominican neighborhood is something to be celebrated. But an Irish neighborhood has a dark side.

Lemon comments "The kind of minds that write this stuff are the most and worst of the bigots because they can never see past color, race, religion or ethnicity. For them that is the whole of a person and people are labeled and stuck in slots according to color, etc. and are never to be let out. They are obsessed with race and religion."